Mental Illness as Survival Training
Reclaiming our place in apocalyptic storytelling
If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is an essay in my ongoing “Writing Fiction to Heal in Real Time” series where I deep-dive into my writing fiction to heal method as field work and a case study. To begin, I will be working through my story, The Archive, which you can find more information on here.
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Disclaimer: Last week I said we would be talking about an updated publishing schedule… JK! That’s next week and this week is a completely different topic. Surprise!
In my imagination, I’ve watched the world end in a hundred different ways. But I’ve never seen anyone like me in the ashes. Someone like Ari.
Apocalyptic media rarely depicts mental illness and when it does, it’s often villainized (the “unstable” character), romanticized (the brooding loner trope), or erased altogether because the truth is that society doesn’t give much credence to the idea that those of us who struggle with mental illness can actually survive a collapse or apocalypse.
Pre-Collapse
Let’s get super honest with each other right now… mental illness already goes underserved in the current world: stigma, lack of access, affordability, systemic neglect. Even in the “best-case scenario,” many people barely make it. I’ve lived with the tragedy and pain of someone choosing to end their life. I’ve also been in that place where ending my own life felt like the only option. But I’m one of the lucky ones… I’ve always had the benefit and luxury of support. Whether it was medication, support from family or friends, or therapy.
But make no mistake… mental health resources are stretched thin now. The systems meant to support people with those mental illnesses will be one of the things to collapse first.
But what happens to the people whose survival has always depended on invisible scaffolding?
What happens to the woman who just started a new antidepressant and hasn’t made it through the adjustment period yet?
What happens to the teen who relies on weekly therapy to regulate their emotions, and suddenly has no access to it?
What happens to the man whose bipolar disorder is managed only by a very specific medication with no generic alternative—and now that pharmacy’s been looted and burned?
Maybe some people try to ration their pills. Maybe others go cold turkey, not by choice but by necessity. Some spiral into episodes—psychosis, panic, catatonia. Others become hyper-functional for a while, adrenaline replacing routine, only to crash hard when that runs out.
And then there’s the social element. In a survivalist world, people who need “extra care” might be seen as liabilities. The mentally ill, the neurodivergent, the emotionally dysregulated… we’re not written into those futures. We’re either left behind or transformed into threats, burdens, or plot devices.
But maybe not everyone gets cast out. Maybe some communities understand that survival isn’t just about strength—it’s about empathy, adaptability, and trust. Maybe someone like Ari gets a seat at the fire because she notices things others don’t. Because she knows how to sit with fear without letting it rot her.
Post-Collapse
In most collapse stories, survivors are built like steel. They’re competent, stoic, resilient in a way that leaves no room for fragility, let alone mental illness. The people who cry too much, freeze, or fall apart are either dead within the first act or written off as liabilities to the group. Mental illness, if it appears at all, is villain-coded or used as shorthand for “untrustworthy.”
But there are some rare, vital exceptions—characters who show us what it looks like to survive not just zombies or nuclear fallout, but the collapse of one’s inner world alongside the outer.
Kevin Garvey from The Leftovers hallucinates entire lives while struggling to hold onto reality after the mass disappearance of 2% of the world. Ellie from The Last of Us spirals into grief, rage, and PTSD, all while trying to cling to her humanity in a crumbling world. Even Sarah Connor from Terminator 2 is institutionalized for “delusions” that just happen to be true. These aren’t cautionary tales, they’re case studies in endurance.
And then there’s Nick from Fear the Walking Dead, maybe the closest mainstream depiction of addiction and potential mental illness in a true apocalyptic setting. He’s chaotic, volatile, tender. His story doesn’t offer redemption in a neat bow—it offers complexity. We see withdrawal. We see relapse. We see survival that isn’t clean.
That’s what’s missing from most apocalypse narratives: the survival of people who don’t fit the “hero” mold.
Ari, in The Archive, belongs to this lineage—not because she’s broken, but because she keeps going. Even without medication. Even when her brain is screaming. She writes. She documents. She names the ache. That, too, is survival.
These characters don’t just represent mental illness—they show us how mental illness survives. How it adapts. How it remains invisible in plain sight. In a genre obsessed with survival, maybe it’s time we start asking: who gets to survive, and who gets written out of the story?
Mental Illness as Apocalypse Training
There is some hope though. I have a theory that those of us with mental illness will actually have an advantage when it comes to the end of the world as we know it.
People with certain mental illnesses like anxiety are experts in worst-case scenarios. People with depression have survived emptiness that feels like the end of the world. Isolation, hyper-vigilance, masking, fear management—this is survival training most don’t recognize as such.
We’ve already learned how to live in uncertainty. To wake up with dread in our chests and still get dressed. To plan exit strategies for rooms that aren’t on fire yet. To monitor the emotional weather of everyone around us like our lives depend on it, because sometimes, they do.
Some of us are intimately familiar with scarcity. Of energy. Of hope. Of willpower. We know how to keep going when everything inside us is screaming to stop. That’s not just mental illness, it’s endurance. It’s adaptation. It’s the kind of quiet resilience that doesn’t get glamorized, but that real survival depends on.
And we’ve developed tools. Maybe not all of them are healthy, but they work. Repetition. Mantras. Breathing exercises. Rituals that create order where there is none. Some of us have entire systems of internal self-regulation just to make it through a “normal” day. In a world that’s collapsing, that kind of internal infrastructure might be what keeps someone alive.
It’s not that mental illness makes someone better suited to survive. It’s that surviving mental illness means we already know how to suffer and keep going. We’ve done it before. We’ll do it again.
I think about Ari, post-collapse, curled in on herself mid-panic attack with nothing but her notebook, animals, and her own breath. And then I think about how she gets up. How she writes. How she makes meaning when everything else feels meaningless.
That’s the kind of survivor I believe in. That’s the kind of survivor I want to be.
The Archive is a Survival Manual
Maybe this is why The Archive matters so much to me. Why Ari matters.
She isn’t a chosen one. She doesn’t have a special weapon or an immunity or a secret bunker. What she has is breath. A pen. A moment of clarity between panic attacks. And she chooses to document the world even as it burns.
She doesn’t fight the monsters, she writes about them. She won’t always run—sometimes she will have to sit with it all, and somehow that’s braver to me.
The Archive isn’t just a story to me. It’s a survival manual for those of us who’ve been told we wouldn’t last. It’s a reminder that survival doesn’t always look like action, it can look like naming what hurts. Like writing down a memory so it won’t disappear.
In the ruins of the world, the people who know how to sit with pain, to feel everything and not be destroyed by it—those are the ones who will teach the rest of us how to survive.
Maybe we won’t be the ones building barricades or leading the charge. Maybe we’ll be the ones holding space. Tending grief. Creating meaning from chaos. Writing it all down.
Ari survives not because she is fearless—but because she is honest. Because she listens. Because she keeps going. And maybe that’s what survival really is: staying with yourself long enough to pass on the story.
I only hope to be half the survivor she is becoming when our world finally implodes.
Next time…
I’ll actually be talking about my scheduled break as well as providing some fun resources to check out while I’m away.
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This is so true. Even during 2020-21, I was looking at people losing their shit and thinking, "some of you have never experienced childhood trauma and it shows". Don't get me wrong; that long isolation and uncertainty messed me up, but I had my hard-won habits of dark humor and 'make the demons earn their keep'.
I love that you both understand and write this down so the rest of us can understand! When covid first hit, I asked a social worker friend of mine how his patients were doing. He said the ones with long standing anxiety were doing the best. They already had the tools to deal with scary uncertainty along with years of practice using those tools. True resilience is invisible in our current culture.